Automattic raises $300M Series D from Salesforce Ventures at a post-money valuation of $3B
Today Automattic announced it has closed … Sara Fischer / Axios : WordPress.com owner Automattic raises $300 million Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News : Automattic Raises $300M Series D from Salesforce Ventures at $3B Valuation Christopher Hamman / Coinspeaker : WordPress' Parent Company Raises $300 Million from Salesforce to Hit $3 Billion Valuation Brian Krogsgard / Post Status : Salesforce Ventures invests $300 million in Automattic, at a $3 billion valuation Om Malik / On my Om : Salesforce invests in Automattic Paul Sawers / VentureBeat : WordPress.com parent Automattic raises $300 million from Salesforce at a $3 billion valuation Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE : Salesforce invests $300M in WordPress poster child Automattic FinSMEs : Automattic Raises $300M in Series D Funding Tweets: @wordpressdotcom : “What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web.” Today, our parent company @Automattic announced big news! Read @photomatt's thoughts on WordPress, the future of open source, and @SalesforceVC's investment: https://techcrunch.com/... Matt Medeiros / @mattmedeiros : We're moving (rapidly) towards a perception (reality?) that WordPress is simply the software that Automattic /happens/ to open source. Sorta like how Salesforce happens to open source some components. Eric Lemoine / @ratibus : “While the company has been around for nearly 15 years, it hasn't raised a ton of money. It closed a $160 million Series C round back in 2014 and raised little money before that.” $160 million == not a ton a money #wtf #crazyWorld https://techcrunch.com/... Rushabh Mehta / @rushabh_mehta : SalesForce makes a defensive $300M investment in @automattic, the company behind Wordpress and Woocommerce. Another big win for Open Source https://techcrunch.com/... @zeldman : “What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web.” https://techcrunch.com/... Vanessa Harris / @technologypoet : I can't help but think that Automattic has gone astray. The recent acquisition of Tumblr then the huge round of financing from Salesforce and now talks of marketplace dominance. I can only hope that the open source parts of WordPress can survive in such an environment. https://twitter.com/... Jon Russell / @jonrussell : Wowwww — Salesforce buys 10% of Wordpress parent for $300M https://ma.tt/... @dhh : “We want every website, whether it's e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress” is a nasty, monopolistic goal. Listening to Matt muse about 85% marketshare dreams is a real downer. But $300m is a down payment on monopoly dreams. https://techcrunch.com/... Matt Farina / @mattfarina : “Back in 2014, 22% of the world's top 10 million websites used WordPress. There are now 34% of the world's top 10 million websites running on WordPress.” This is a PHP app. Solving problems with people in mind is a bigger deal than programming language. https://techcrunch.com/... @amix3k : Business is booming in the remote-first world. Multi-billion-$ companies are created. This is just the beginning 🚀 — Gitlab raises $268M on a $2.76 billion valuation https://techcrunch.com/... — Automattic raises $300M on a $3 billion valuation https://techcrunch.com/... Marko Saric / @markosaric : .@photomatt: “I think there's potential to get to a similar market share as Android, which I believe now has 85% of all handsets. When you think about it, open source has a virtuous cycle of adoption, people building on the platform and more adoption” https://techcrunch.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Salesforce Ventures is putting $300 million into Automattic at a $3 billion post-money valuation, the largest round yet for the WordPress.com parent. The timing matters: Automattic had just closed its acquisition of Tumblr for $3 million weeks earlier, so the raise lands right as the company starts consolidating publishing properties.
The arc that follows validates the price. By early 2021 Automattic was raising $288M more at $7.5B — two and a half times this valuation — alongside a $250M share buyback, and had begun deploying its own capital into startups like Titan's $30M Series A.
First-order effects
- Automattic gets a war chest sized for acquisitions rather than runway, immediately after paying just $3 million for Tumblr — capital that later funds the plan to move Tumblr's backend onto WordPress.
- Salesforce Ventures takes a major position in one of the web's foundational open-source platforms, extending its portfolio beyond pure CRM-adjacent software.
Second-order effects
- The raise turns Automattic itself into a check-writer: it leads Titan's $30M Series A at a $300M valuation, pulling SMB email tooling into its orbit.
- Rival publishing and CMS platforms now compete against a WordPress owner with strategic backing from Salesforce, raising the bar for independent competitors' own fundraising.
Third-order effects
- The follow-on coverage shows where this pattern leads: large private rounds plus $250M employee buybacks make internal liquidity a standing feature of Automattic's structure, letting it stay private through a 2.5x valuation jump instead of heading to IPO.
- If strategic investors keep bankrolling open-source infrastructure companies at multi-billion valuations, category ownership concentrates around a handful of well-capitalized stewards — WordPress under Automattic being the template.
The trend: Open-source infrastructure companies are raising ever-larger strategic rounds that fund both consolidation and employee liquidity, delaying exits while concentrating platform ownership.